Destructive Use of Language

I am a firm believer that the way in which one uses the English language has an impact. When a society loses the clear definition of a term, conceptual understanding related to that term is sacrificed. The recent news about Judge Sotomayor's comments with regard to her being more qualified to make judicial judgments based on her race and gender has been described as "reverse racism." Adding the term "reverse" implies that racism is something white people do, but not something done to white people. This is utter foolishness. Racism is racism is racism. Regardless of the races involved the intentional denigration of one race in favor of another is racism. Calling this "reverse racism" is dangerous because it divides these kinds of comments into categories that can be used to establish justification for dismissing so called "reverse racism" as something other than true racism. I was pleased to see that Sotomayor repudiated her statement, but the lasting damage from the media mismanagement in covering this, I fear will be longer lasting.